By the Power of Sausages!
by Scholar of Time
Summary: When dressing as an hero of an alternate dimension, and unintentionally being cast as that hero...it's an unlucky Xander Harris whose heavy hand held the sausage.


**Disclaimer: I don't own Joss Whedon's handiwork (his self-destruction by proxy is way too emo/grimdark for my tastes) and I don't own Magicka, though I play it often.**

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Sausages. It all came back to sausages...

Xander Harris was a relatively bright young man, which would have been quite a shock for any of his friends to find out about. To them, he was the useless comedic foil – their buddy who was always quick with a joke and a good pack-mule/donut-fetcher. What most of them had never taken the time to think about, was that he had been raised like a non-entity. His parents treated him so badly, that he would sleep outside on holidays, despite the risks of the vampiric and demonic residents of his hometown Sunnydale. His parents blamed him for the woes of their life, and for that reason, he kept his head down, tried not to stick out from the crowd.

"Come on, Wills! I can't get this stuff, you know that – you make with the brain, I make with the donuts.", Xander half-joked.

"Xander – you will study for your Math exam; resolve face, right here!", asserted Willow, his childhood friend, as she stamped her foot on the floor.

Because of his friend Willow, Xander never really had a need to stretch himself intellectually – and if he were honest with himself, he'd realize that he always acted stupid so that she would feel smarter in comparison. However, let's keep in mind the main problem of this young man's life – demonic hellspawn and a semi-open portal to Hell(s) which was underneath his high school.

"Xander, Ms. Rosenberg – please show a modicum of awareness to our surroundings; you are, in fact, within a library – no matter how much you may or may not be cognizant of that fact." admonished the Watcher-cum-Librarian Rupert Giles. His task of keeping the Slayer safe and training her to fight the darkness had never truly prepared him for the day-to-day struggle of herding teenagers, 'More's the pity', he thought, as he rubbed his glasses on his shirt.

Admittedly, Xander wasn't the Slayer – Buffy Summers, his relatively new friend, had that dubious honor. On the one hand, he didn't have her superior strength – on the other hand, he had never been put in a mental institution by his parents for believing in vampires. It was Xander's private thought that even if he had indicated his belief, they would simply have ignored him – so he would prefer the powers. In any case, Xander had no such destiny in front of him, except perhaps an eventual death at the hands of some demon or other in his quest for vengeance for his fallen friend/brother Jesse. He could have walked away...but vengeance is a powerful motivation, not to mention it made him feel useful for the first time in his life.

Turning away from Willow, Xander began to pretend to study for his math exam, while reading a book off to the side about magical dimension travel and local stories. He had been doing this for several weeks instead of focusing much on his studies, instead choosing to build up his knowledge of his new 'occupation'. It only made sense that when he encountered old stories of a mystical dimension filled with powerful magic-users who had thrown off the manipulations of Old Gods and demons alike, he was enamored of the idea.

"Hey, G-man! Who're these wizard dudes in this thing? They sound awesome, sort of like Power Rangers...not that Power Rangers are awesome or anything..*cough*" Xander asked, while sliding the book down the table to a befuddled and annoyed Giles.

"Xander, I have told you time and again – these sorts of tomes are manuscripts from the Medieval period, of which we don't even have incunabula copies, much less modern printings thereof. Please be careful with their bindings!"

Willow, meanwhile, was annoyed for an entirely different reason, "Xander, you're supposed to be studying – what happens if you don't get a good grade on this test, you could be held back or have to do extra work over the summer and your job possibilities will be lowered and you won't be able to join me in AP classes or even follow what I'm studying!" she said in one breath rapidly.

Xander just gave a sheepish grin and asked again, "Well, sorry about the book and the class, but honestly – this is so much cooler! They blasted stuff and kicked butt – why can't we just learn to do that?"

Giles shook his head and replied, "It's not a matter of what we can or cannot do – magic does not work like these stories; one must invoke demonic or higher powers in order to effect change on the world, neither of which comes without cost".

Despite Xander's disappointment with that answer, when he was later pressganged by the troll-like vice-principal Snyder to be an Halloween escort, he turned to their stories once more for inspiration. So, in preparation for Halloween, Xander decided to make a costume of what he felt those wizards would look like – very cliché robes, with a hood that completely obscured the face and a big wide brimmed pointy hat. In addition, it gave him a reason to carry a sword that night – certainly useful in a town where the high school never made the front page, but the students frequented the obituaries in vast numbers.

Xander didn't have a great deal of money, so Partytown was right out as a potential costume store. The only place cheap enough for his budget was the new costume shop 'Ethan"s' , which had opened up just before that Halloween. Though the shop displays looked alright, the shop itself smelled a bit musky, as if whomever had moved in had merely shoved all the items inside and then tidied up a bit. The owner Ethan offered the prop necessary for his costume at a quarter of the retail price, supposedly as an apology for startling Xander earlier by creeping up on him unnoticed. In Ethan's shop, the prop he was looking for – the half-moon top for the staff he had made – allowed him to finish his costume just in time for the holiday.

Looking at himself in the mirror, Xander could only exclaim, "Wow!...I look like a total dork, how was I stupid enough to dress like this?" Head downcast, he trudged out to the front yard to make his way to the Summers residence, where he fully expected to be ridiculed by Buffy for his poor choices.

In any other universe, perhaps Ethan's chaotic magic would have picked out any sort of vague magical hero – but in this universe, Xander's parents had left uncooked sausages in the fridge as the only remaining food source that day. When he had cooked one, he got the idea that Willow would be terribly amused if he pretended that he had cooked it over an open fire – and thus skewered it on a stick. Woe betide Powers Above and Below...Alderheimr Wizardry had arrived in the world.

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**Author's Note: **I know, I know – I haven't updated in two years...and this is a new story. But hey! It's my writing, I'll write when I want to – you would write too, if you happened to muse! Or something like that...


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